


Due

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: In Bed, Patience patients patience, Pre Reichenbach, Reunion, double 221B
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 01:55:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of them has a flair for the romantic. Turns out they both do but what’s needed is not that shining thing, the coat and the cab and the swirl and the slam, but a dull, teeth-setting…</p>
<p>Grind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Due

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [ Professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl) for reading, for waiting.
> 
> And [Science](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession/pseuds/ScienceofObsession), this is also for you.

_“People underestimate the importance of diligence as a virtue”—Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance_

 Under no circumstances should you get up.

  
That's what John said when he left, said, you know, you'll be all right but you   
  
Need to rest; yes John I know.  
  
It's nothing, a disturbance of RNA, recruitment error, viral, jacked him up a few degrees, left him buzzing over the metal zoo of his city until John put a hand between his brows, locked him down.

There was a key somewhere.  
  
There was a heap of straw in the first-quarter moonlight (phasic, malleable) in which there was an earring, tanzanite (calcium aluminum hydroxy silicate, the “blue suicide,” soft and rare and found-only), over and over that trichoic crystal, the key to a case. It took forever.

It's not that he doesn't have patience. He just doesn't call it patience when over and over the replication in his own cells, the lunate folds of the cortex, he’s… seen it, long-awaited microscopy, 3D images of polio--blue, bunched, beautiful--used them as wallpaper in the palace for a time.

At the clinic John will be _glittering_ (a word he’ll choose only now _)_ in the window, not owning it, waxing to the stroll home (to his door and his chair and his charge), to exercise his flair for the undramatic.

He put his hand here, there, just there; said stay, stay here, stay in bed.  
  
 *******  
  
Places want to be loved.   
  
(No need to state the obvious, you know, about the people.)  
  
Baker Street: I waited for you.

John: I waited, you unrepentant bastard.  
  
There's no need to say these things.   
  
One of us has a flair for the romantic. Turns out they both do but what’s needed is not that shining thing, the coat and the cab and the swirl and the slam, but a dull, teeth-setting…

Grind. In an airport, seeing John after nearly two years, and there he is, absently wiping his nose on a frayed sleeve, two days into a cold, ought to be in bed.  He knows now that it’s more the waiting than the acting, more the straw than the stone...oh, he's back, still not good at, well, he _diverts_ , counts claws on the starlings (gemmy, beflocked) outside the window, thinks about the structure of viral polymerase, strokes the bow, touches his own brow.

Here he is wandering, armed, lunartropic,slips out at night and legs it to the places John goes, will go, has been, where he works his undramatic…undevotion.  

People want to be loved.

Sherlock picks locks, sketches triclinics, writes:

_I’m good at_

_Keeping secrets_

_Abiding._

It takes months and _he isn’t_ (good at those) but John stops, looks at him a long wondering time, takes him back to bed.  


 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [ Tanzanite, blue zoisite, otherwise known as “blue suicide”](http://www.uamineralmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/zoisite-variety-tanzanite-05.jpg).
> 
> [ 3D image, poliovirus](http://childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site3022/mainpageS3022P65.html)
> 
> And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet  
> 'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin  
> And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...  
> And I've seen it all, I've seen it all  
> Through the yellow windows of the evening train... –Tom Waits, “9th & Hennepin”
> 
>  
> 
> [ Tom Waits,”9th & Hennepin”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlI7vaxBm9o)


End file.
